With a choice of being a victim or the victimizer, a young boy chooses to become a monster
If there was one serial killer who deserved to be sentenced to death it was Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour.
Like all babies, he was born innocent, but that innocence was squeezed out of him at an early age and replaced by a malicious evil that enabled him, on the mean streets of Cairo in the 1990s, to become the brutal leader of a street gang while still in his teens.
Born in the small village of Tanta just north of Cairo, Egypt, from the age of 12 he worked in a small cafeteria at the local train station to help support his family, returning at the end of the day to give his paltry earnings to his parents.
Some days his earnings were even less than paltry, or totally non-existent, replaced by bruises and scars delivered by a local thug called “Al-Tourbini”, The Express Train.
The young Mansour endured the regular beatings and the loss of his hard-earned wages at the fists of his tormentor for as long as he could, powerless as he was, too small to fight back, too poor to leave the job.
Then one day that decision of whether to stay or leave was made for him as his tormentor threw him from a moving train, not caring if Ramadan lived or died. But before doing that he stole all his money, gave him another beating, and brutally raped him.
It took Mansour a month in hospital to recover from his physical injuries; his mental ones were to be an open sore for the rest of his life, a life that was to be forever damaged due to this one horrific event.
When he was finally released, he decided to run away from his past rather than return home and escaped to Cairo, his soul as empty of feelings as his pockets were of money.
Alone for the first time in his life, penniless, hungry, he was easily lured into a local street gang who welcomed him into their cold embrace.
Their indoctrination process involved more beatings, and harsh lessons of survival, any mistakes rewarded by a quick slice or two from a sharp razor blade.
Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour was a quick study, absorbed the pain inflicted upon him, proudly displayed the scars, learned the lessons, and fostered feelings of revenge upon those who tortured him ritually, gleefully.
As he rose up the ranks in the gang, he suppressed his urges and used his anger to propel him to eventually become the leader.
Unfortunately, rather than becoming a beacon for reform, for changing past injustices within the gang, Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour became the worst kind of monster on the mean streets of Cairo.
Those within the street gang who had tortured him relentlessly were killed, their bodies discarded like so much trash in the fetid alleyways.
Mansour reveled in the newfound power that he had never possessed before in his life, no longer a victim, the cloak of the bully sitting perfectly on his broadening shoulders.
But he didn’t just become a brutal, heartless killer. He became a brutal, heartless rapist.
His victims were those in his own gang who got on his wrong side, any runaways he encountered, any boys who would not be missed by anyone any time soon, or ever.
One such intended victim was Ahmed Nagui, a 12-year-old member of Mansour’s gang. Somehow, he managed to escape Mansour’s clutches and reported the attempted rape to the local police.
His report was followed up, and Mansour was interviewed, but it became a case of who was the most credible person. When a scrawny street thug accuses an adult of assault, of rape, official ears and eyes can be deaf and blind when no evidence or witnesses accompany the accusations.
Ahmed Nagui’s case was dismissed out of hand, but the corroborating evidence was soon to follow in the most horrific fashion.
Incensed at being questioned, and interrogated by the local police for hours, Mansour retaliated in the worst way he knew how, raping Ahmed, then murdering him, then hurling his lifeless body from a moving train.
This became his M.O., and he soon became known as Al Tourbini, the same name as the rapist who had molested him when he was himself 12-years-old. Rather than shy away from his new name, however, he embraced it, and for the next seven years, from Cairo to Alexandria to Ben Sueif, he murdered, raped, and brutalized 32 boys from the ages of 10 to 14.
All empathy, all traces of a conscience had been squeezed from the soul of Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour.
He and his six accomplices would lure unsuspecting children up to the carriage on top of the train, rape, beat and brutalize them, then hurl them from the speeding train, whether they were dead or barely alive.
They just didn’t care.
If not for the police discovering three discarded bodies by the side of the train tracks in 2006, the spree would have continued for years.
As it was, two of Mansour’s accomplices were arrested when the trail of dead bodies led back to them. They were interrogated in a non-friendly manner in a dank cellar, the fear in their eyes locked on the ground in an attempt to avoid the near murderous looks they were getting from their interrogators.
At first, they denied everything, even knowing Mansour, but they could sense, by the way the knuckles of the officers were whitening on their batons, that they had to confess or those batons were soon going to be used to beat the truth out of them.
Mansour was promptly arrested along with another four accomplices. All seven of them went to court, their guilt evident, each with their own version to tell to get the lightest sentence possible. Apart from Mansour.
He displayed no remorse whatsoever, his callous recounting of how he had committed his despicable crimes told in a matter-of-fact manner.
During the trial, Mansour fully confessed to raping and killing 32 young boys, yet only 15 bodies were ever recovered. His murderous crime spree had spread far across the country and many of his victims had been casually tossed into the Nile, buried alive, or pulverized when thrown before oncoming trains.
Shocked to his core, the judge handed down sentences commensurate to the heinous crimes. Five of the accomplices were given prison terms in 2007 when the trial concluded of between 3 and 40 years. The harshest verdicts were handed down to Mansour and Farag Samir Mahmoud, his henchman.
They were both given the death penalty, and three years later on December 16, 2010, in Burj Al Arab Prison, their executions were carried out, a noose slipped over their heads, cinched in place, and then their connection to the earth kicked away until they gasped their last breaths.
Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour’s reign of terror was over, and a remorseless serial killer, callously known as Al-Tourbini, was removed from the streets of Cairo.
And a system that had failed Ahmed Nagui and 31 other young victims, had finally meted out justice to a rapist and a killer who, in the end, got exactly what he deserved.